oob205

Also worked in edtech for many years and while I understand Audrey got the reputation for saying the negative, someone had to do it. The general media is so uncritically positive (for example of Knewton which was always snake oil). She had to be the voice of reason.

Yes! Expertise is good, but overrated. I've found that you can be much happier getting good enough at a broad range of skills that combine professional, personal and whimsical

Availability is only part of the answer. As article notes, even when it's available, far fewer men take it. In my experience, it still comes down to the known hit to your career. I worked for a large tech co. in a "liberal" city that offered generous parental leaves. Most new mothers took many months off. Fathers, if they took p-leave at all, would take it in small chunks. Not having to leave work for a long period helped their career growth/trajectory tremendously.

Ah, the problems with the college. College majors are by design imperfect. Journalism, Math, Computer Science - those are very broad strokes and rarely map directly to the skills one would need for a job. OP's is a good example of why college education should move away from majors and departments, and into something more akin to "individualized studies." My undergrad had something like that. For students who had a passion and an idea of what they wanted to learn, it was golden. They got to design their own unique, multidisplinary paths through university.

I have to disagree with you. This will make standardized testing worse, not better. With human grading, the humanities managed to avoid (to an extent) the extreme standardization of what should and should not be taught. There was still room for creativity. Now the type of writing that cannot be graded by an algorithm will get even less room in our curricula. Goodbye to poetry, satire, and other creative endeavors.

"It's not just jacking up prices; it's about keeping competition down to reasonable levels.

Limiting the number of restaurants means that there will be enough customers for most of them."

There's no such thing as 'keeping competition down to reasonable levels.' That's why we have a market. The optimal supply of restaurants and customers should be determined by the market, not government or protectionist incumbents. Unless you can make a legitimate case that allowing more food trucks, restaurants, or whatever else harms the health or security of society, there is zero reason to limit their numbers.

Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No company can guarantee that, no matter how good.

Thiel Fellowship draws stellar applicants who I suspect would be successful, college or not. I do wish more regular American high school students got the opportunity to do something similar, i.e., put off college for two years to work and explore passion. I won't go as far as to say college is a waste of time (it's still the most sure-fire route out of poverty for example). But a lot of people go at 18 because it's the next step and end up floundering. I believe we'd get a better return on higher education in the US if there were more regular and accepted opportunities for students to work for a year or two, then decide if college is the right next step.

I dont think students are all in the clear in the least bit. I just happen to believe that permitting online resources implies permitting collaboration, as the internet is a tool for collaboration as much as it is a tool for pure research. As far as I'm concerned, it a test is open internet, then it's de facto collaboration permitted.

Um..yes. Study groups or websites are online resources. So is facebook. If a student posts the questions online and starts discussions with anonymous posters, or even reads relevant discussions posted online before the test, how is that different from discussing with one another. There are plenty of ways to have a test that explicitly prevents collaboration. This professor clearly did not try.

I initially read this without looking at the date at the top (1997). Made me a little sad that I assumed the entire exchange happened recently. Not much has changed in the 15 years since.

Worth noting that a way NOT to teach kids to love math is to inundate them with arithmetic. My math education, like many in the US, was an endless barrage of memorizing facts, solving equations, then memorizing some more facts. It was not until college that I began to see the essence of math is creativity. Kids are naturally creative and inquisitive and we should use this to our advantage in early education. We should explore topics like topology and infinity, topics that still blow my adult, math-major mind. We also need to encourage students to be creators in math. One of the ways we learn to love reading is by writing and making up our own stories. We can have students make puzzles, write computer programs, and see that they can invent things with math.

For a more informed perspective on how we teach math all wrong, I recommend Lockhart's Lament: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

“A large part of the plagiarism arises from lack of understanding of the expected standards of behavior in U.S. academic institutions"

Or maybe it arises from perfect understanding of the standard of behaviors in US academic institutions. As article notes, 43% in the US admit to cheating. Truth is probably even higher. I'm not faulting Coursera for doing what they think will work to curb cheating, but this idea that cheaters are the "other" from countries where they don't know any better is ridiculous.